Romania: Second Chance for Education in Rural Areas

Second Chance in Education

Soros Foundation Romania launched “Second Chance in Education”, a three years project aiming to prevent and reduce early school leaving in 21 rural communities.

The project addresses the fourth target of New Europe 2020 Strategy to reduce school drop-out rates below 10%. 2010’s figures for Romania indicate a 16.6 percents of school leaving, with 2.2 percents higher than the European average.

With core target group coming from socially disadvantaged and marginalized segments of people, the “Second Chance in Education” project will mainly involve children from large or single parent families, Roma children and youngsters who are being left behind by both of their migrating parents.

The phenomena of leaving school in Romania will be addressed through this project by community interventions, creation of local support groups and by developing integrated socio-educational services.

A special emphasis will be placed on enhancing communities members’ involvement in maintaining the youngsters considered at risk of early school leaving, inside the educational system. In addition, other activities will consists of strengthening school-community-parents partnerships, training courses for staff involved in projects aimed to prevent early school leaving and good practices exchange in the field of socio-educational services.

The project also contains a national and local communication and information campaign focused on increasing the public awareness concerning prevention, reduction and correction of school leaving phenomena.

As expected results, 21 socio-educational services shall be developed, orientation and consultation services shall be provided for a minimum of 420 pupils at risk of early school leaving and their families, 126 staff involved in projects and programmes aimed to prevent early school leaving training shall be trained, 50 000 people will be informed on the importance of education in order to prevent early school leaving.

The project is co-financed from European Social Fund through Sectorial Operational Program Human Resources Development 2007-2013.

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